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1. It is used because gold was known to be a very inert element.
2. The use of gold had nothing to do with its reactivity, any more than the experiment had any connection to chemistry. Rutherford wanted to fire alpha particles through the foil. Alpha particles are not very penetrating; a sheet of notepaper will stop most of them. To achieve a reasonable percentage of penetration the foil needed to be really thin.
Gold is highly malleable; gold leaf can be made in thicknesses around 100 nm or 4 micro-inch. It was the best material for the job.

He established that atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons. Well sir, i was just wondering the same thing. I have to do a worksheet and answer it, no…t so lucky for me, this was one of my big questions. If anybody would like to answer this really soon, that would be oh so very helpful.Thank you, and have a nice day. ^That is no answer, just a sorry excuse The gold foil experiment proved that the atom is mostly empty space with a small, dense nucleus. True answer by Justin Wilkes

The Geiger-Marsden experiment, which is also called the gold foil experiment or the Rutherford experiment, was conducted by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden in 1909, under Earne…st Rutherford's direction. You need a link to the Wikipedia post on this ground-breaking experiment, and we've got one for you.

In 1911, Ernest Rutherford conducted an experiment that proved that the mass of an atom is concentrated in the center (nucleus) of an atom. It also proved that an atom is most…ly empty space. In his experiment, he emitted positively-charged particles at a piece of gold foil. Many of the particles went straight through, some were deflected, and some were reflected.

The scattering angles would have changed, but the qualitative results would also change: the reason Rutherford chose gold was because it is EXTREMELY malleable. One can stretc…h gold foil until it is only a few atoms thick in places, which is not possible with aluminum. If the foil were too thick, there would be no transmission of particles at all; the whole point was to demonstrate that most alpha particles passed through unchanged, but some of them scattered, which is only possible with a VERY thin foil.

Rutherford was a scientist who shot alpha particles through a very thin sheet of gold foil. The results of this experiment are the following: -Almost all alpha particles passe…d right through the Gold foil -A few alpha particlas were deflected and repelled .....These conclusions show that the majority of the atom of gold is empty space except for a small, positively charged nucleus. This nucleus is the reason why some alpha particlas were deflected(Alpha particles have a positive charge, which is repelled by a positive nucleus).

basically, Rutherford shot postively charged particles at a thin sheet of gold foil. most of the particles passed straight through, but some bounced off at sharp angles. This …implies that most of the atom is empy space (which is why most of the particles go straight throught) , but there is a positively charged nucleus at the center (which repels the postively charged particles, so if a particle hits the nucleus, it bounces off )

He discovered that some alpha particles were deflected by atoms. From this he concluded that the popular "plum pudding" model of an atom, where people thought that an atom was… a positive particle filled with smaller negative particles, was wrong. Instead he created the atomic model which has a nucleus (neutrons and protons) surrounded by much smaller electrons.